Category: The Players
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Private Military Contractors – A Short History
Throughout history, military forces have depended on civilian contractors of one sort or another to give their military personnel flexibility, or to fulfill logistical and support functions that soldiers do not need to do.
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Urartu Mehmet
Mustafa Kusman at Cavustepe. The small carpark on top of the hill, at the Urartian fortress ruins at Cavustepe, offers an impressive panorama of the surrounding countryside. A lush green plain, between two ridges, is laid out at our feet, sparsely punctuated with the occasional Kurdish village. A small hut at the entrance to the…
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Israel – Bourke Kennedy Down On The West Bank
With a Christian peacemaker on the West Bank HEBRON — At an age when most people are retired or thinking about slowing down, Bourke Kennedy routinely journeys to a part of the world that the U.S. State Department strongly advises American citizens to avoid. For the past decade, Kennedy, 67, has been travelling to the…
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The Rescuers
Say hello to the U.S. Army’s general order number one – NO ALCOHOL!! But it’s not all bad for being locked down 24/7: The jailed Taliban who reside about one hundred feet from my tent don’t drink anyway, so no harm-no foul for those sons-of-bitches. If anyone wants to send me a kite, however, I…
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Gangland San Salvador
The quiet dirt street seems peaceful enough. An old lady is waiting out the afternoon heat under a shade tree. A small child is happily playing with a dog. Occasionally a car will pass by, the driver greeting neighbors through the rolled-down window. As I stand here in the Central American midday sun, it is…
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Uranium Revolution?: Abdul Qadeer Khan and Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions
When the IAEA recently announced that Iran was possibly in breach of the Nuclear Weapons Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and had likely been developing an enrichment plant in the city of Natanz, the worst predictions of some appeared to have come true. The question on many people’s lips is where exactly they procured the expertise to…